This Handmade Life is all about finding a passion and becoming really good at it. Divided into seven sections-baking, fermenting, self-care, kitchen gardening, soap-making, spices and stitching-this book tells us it is all right to slow down and take up simple projects that bring us unadulterated joy.
Written in Iyer’s signature lyrical and friendly style, the book is about hands-on activities that can be meditative and healing for the body, mind and soul. Taking the reader through myriad personal and transformative hobbies, Iyer has managed to serve up a book that is motivational and inspirational at a time when both are in short order.
Catagory: Non Fiction
non fiction main category
The Whispering Chinar
In Charbagh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, a short detour from the Grand Trunk Road that leads towards Afghanistan, stands a chinar tree in the garden of Khan Mohammad Usman Khan. Legend has it that it was planted by a saint known to the grandfather of the Khan, who had told him that the family would prosper till this tree survived. The tree has stood for generations, a silent witness to the many stories of Charbagh, its grounds held sacred until the day a bullet fired by the oldest son of the Khan hit one of its branches.
In this debut collection of interlinked stories, the banker author recounts the stories as seen by the chinar tree. In Charbagh, a village where modernity slowly creeps in, there are tales of unrequited love, of family honour and religious persecution, of patriarchy and breaking its shackles, and of what it means to belong to Charbagh in tumultuous times.
Here, Fahad Khan falls in love with Saad Bibi, but it is a dangerous affair that threatens to uproot social norms. An imam competes with another for devotees, and an air-crash survivor-turned-teacher is charged with the crime of blasphemy. In Charbagh, Nazo learns why she has been sent away from her family, and Ali finds out how far friendship and trust can go. A banker struggles to make sense of his misfortunes, while Farid Khan must acquaint himself with a woman’s rejection.
Beginning from the 1970s, when the Indus was dammed near Charbagh, these stories chronicle a time and a place of belonging, of nostalgia, and of relationships and friendships. The Whispering Chinar is an extraordinary debut collection that tells stories from an unknown part of our world.
The Art of Management
Careers are changing, and the capabilities required to stay relevant are changing even more rapidly. We seem to have endless choices, at least at the beginning of a career, but these start narrowing after middle management. How does one think about one’s own life and career in this changing decade?
The whole discipline of career management now has three elements to it:
Managing yourself;
Managing your team; and
Managing your business
In this book, Shiv Shivakumar points out that today, unlike in the past, all the three elements are your responsibility. With in-depth interviews with top leaders across the spectrum and an insightful foreword by Sachin Tendulkar, The Art of Management is a must-read.
Phantom Plague
The definitive social history of tuberculosis, from its origins as a haunting mystery to its modern reemergence that now threatens populations around the world.
It killed novelist George Orwell, Eleanor Roosevelt, and millions of others-rich and poor. Desmond Tutu, Amitabh Bachchan, and Nelson Mandela survived it, just. For centuries, tuberculosis has ravaged cities and plagued the human body.
In Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk-remedies, made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled and cured in the West.
The cure was never available to black and brown nations. And the tuberculosis bacillus showed a remarkable ability to adapt-so that at the very moment it could have been extinguished as a threat to humanity, it found a way back, aided by authoritarian government, toxic kindness of philanthropists, science denialism and medical apartheid.
Krishnan’s original reporting paints a granular portrait of the post-antibiotic era as a new, aggressive, drug resistant strain of TB takes over. Phantom Plague is an urgent, riveting and fascinating narrative that deftly exposes the weakest links in our battle against this ancient foe.
Battles of Our Own
An Indian ‘industrial novel’ from the winner of the 1990 Odisha Sahitya Akademi Award
Jagadish Mohanty’s Battles of Our Own is a rare work of modern Odia and Indian fiction. It seeks to delineate a world that is off the grid. Its action unfolds in the remote and non-descript Tarbahar Colliery-a fictional name for the over hundred-year-old open-cast Himgiri Rampur coal mine in the hinterland of western Odisha. A work of gritty realism in its portrayal of a dark and dangerous underworld where coal is extracted, the novel poignantly reveals the primeval struggle between man and brute nature.
Offering a complete experience of the ‘industrial novel’-face offs between trade unions and management, trade union rivalry, and clandestine deals between enemy camps-this work brings alive Mohanty’s literary genius, which takes us to a world beyond the simplistic binary division between the worker and the master. The novel unravels a complex, fractious, and nuanced picture of the human condition.
This sensitive and evocative rendering by Himansu S. Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre captures the thrill, beauty, horror and tragedy of this fictional tour de force.
Chemical Khichdi
Some said children were out of the question, but she is a mother of two boys.
Some said she couldn’t handle business life, but she has interviewed over a hundred CEOs, and counting.
Some said she wouldn’t be able to write a book on mental health, but here it is.
Aparna Piramal Raje is happy, thriving and bipolar. And this is her story.
Part memoir and part self-help guide, Chemical Khichdi provides a pathway for anyone with a mental health condition and the family, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals that love and care for them.
Empathetic, candid and accessible, it outlines ‘seven therapies’ that have enabled Aparna to ‘hack’ her mental health and find equilibrium over the years, and shows how you or someone you know can also do the same.
Superpowers on the Shore
Our coasts are large, vast wildernesses that witness the mystical pageantry of life. They have given us monsters and myths, they are fathoms deep and full of whispers, home to unknown creatures and sprawling ecosystems. They are chasms of beauty and frontiers of possibility. From the space between land and sea, revealed only at low tide, comes a coruscating kaleidoscope of colours and brilliance: the intertidal zone. And the marine lifeforms of these zones are capable of superpowers. Yes, superpowers! Of the kind that comic book characters can only dream of.
The Indian coastline hosts some magnificent intertidal species: solar-powered slugs, escape artist octopuses, venomous jellies, harpooning conus sea snails, to name just a few. It is as biodiverse as a forest wildlife safari, and twice as secretive. From bioluminescence and advanced sonic capabilities to camouflage and shapeshifting, these cloaked assassins are capable of otherworldly skill. Superpowers on the Shore by Sejal Mehta is a dazzling, assured look at some of the creatures with whom we share our world, our water, our monsoons, our beaches and the sandcastles therein.
Come witness the magic of our intertidal superheroes, their fragile beauty and their iridescent drama. Put on your waterproof shoes, pack a bottle of whimsy, bring your sense of wonder. And prepare to be mesmerized
Irrationally Rational
You and your friend each have flights to catch at 8 p.m. and your destination cities are different. You decide to share a cab, but get caught in a rare traffic jam lasting several hours. You end up at the airport around midnight, and surely enough, both of you miss your flights. All quantifiable consequences of missing the flights-cost of tickets cancellation, paying for a new ticket, taking a cab back to the city, overnight stay, taking a cab back to the airport next morning, etc.-are expectedly identical for both. Now suppose the airline assistant tells you, ‘Sorry, your flight left as scheduled at 8 p.m. sharp.’ But your friend is told, ‘Oh, how very unfortunate. Your flight was almost four hours late and only just departed!’ Who feels the greater disappointment? You or your friend?
Neoclassical economics tells us that because both individuals are assumed rational, their regret levels ought to be identical since their economic consequences are identical. Behavioural economists, however, combine psychology with economics, and focus on how real people, with their cognitive biases, actually behave. The friend who just missed the flight does indeed experience greater disappointment than the one who missed the flight by a margin of four hours. Does that make one or the other irrational?
Irrationally Rational takes you through the journey of such rationality-irrationality arguments, showing why economics shorn of psychology may be incomplete. It is the first book of its kind, collating the works of ten Nobel Laureates largely responsible for the rise of behavioural economics, that makes understanding behavioural economics more fun and accessible.
Migrant Lives
The theme of the book is visualizing migrant lives and livelihoods. It is a book of photographs taken in the field by the Principal Investigators and the researchers in Guwahati and Jalandhar, over the course of the field based research funded by UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) – Indian Council of Social Sciences Research (ICSSR), for the Collaborative Project “From the Margins: Exploring Low Income Migrant Workers Access to Basic Services”. The book will also include photographs taken by the migrants about their own lives and work. These latter images emerged from workshops conducted with migrants, organized by Dr. Jeevan Sharma [PI University of Edinburgh] Prof. Anuj Kapilashrami [Co-PI, University of Essex], and Ms. Anurita Hazarika of NEN, at the two research sites, Guwahati, Assam and Jalandhar, Punjab.
Vultures
Gujarat, 1964. The agrarian system of renewable annual contract mandates fulltime labour on the houses and farms of landlords. In these bleak circumstances, Iso, a tanner by birth, graduates from being a child labourer to an adult serf on the estate of Mavaji. His life is one of humiliation, hunger and drudgery, and the only respite comes in the form of Diwali, Mavaji’s daughter. Between them exists a physical relationship that is shrouded in secrecy, shame and fear. Even as Iso creates distance between them, a chance encounter turns to violence and tragedy, and he faces the brutal sword of caste patriarchy.
Based on the blood-curdling murder of a Dalit boy by Rajput landlords in Kodaram village in 1964, Vultures portrays a feudal society structured around caste-based relations and social segregation, in which Dalit lives and livelihoods are torn to pieces by upper-caste vultures. The deft use of dialect, graphic descriptions and translator Hemang Ashwinkumar’s lucid telling throw sharp focus on the fragmented world of a mofussil village in Gujarat, much of which remains unchanged even today.